Is Grammarly Helpful

I’ve just finished re-reading Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms and it made me think about how much the process of writing has changed. No handwritten manuscripts these days, nor manuscripts laboriously typed out on a manual typewriter. When I think of how many revisions I make to my first draft I can’t imagine how long it used to take to craft a final manuscript.

Today, agents and publishers expect submitted manuscripts to be already edited to a fairly high standard and I guess most writers use some form of AI to help with that. Yet sometimes editing software is unhelpful, especially when one is writing a work of fiction. I have found Grammarly frequently tries to change what I have written into text that would completely lose my meaning. Sure it is helpful in correcting basic spelling mistakes, but the built in editor for Word does that efficiently.

Artificial intelligence is helpful to a certain extent, but it is certainly not always right and frequently quite wrong. I’ve disabled Grammarly in Word as it was driving me insane with its corrections, I did want to write quite and not quiet, I did want to write the sensation of moving through water, not the sensation of moving through the water. Grammarly translated ‘proud of the imagination he’d shown,’ into ‘proud of the images he’d shown.’ I could go on forever.

I’d be interested to know what other writers think.